Bidoun Unwan

At Comptoir des Mines Galerie in Marrakech, the new season opens with a group exhibition whose title is a small puzzle in itself. In Arabic, Bidoun Unwan means "untitled", but it also means "without an address", and it is this double meaning that sets the tone for a show about displacement, wandering and the contemporary forms of exile.

The exhibition brings together four Moroccan artists: Mohamed Arejdal, who was born in Guelmim and is based in Marrakech; Larbi Cherkaoui, born in Marrakech; the photographer Khalil Nemmaoui; and Simohammed Fettaka, who was born in Tangier and works between Tangier and Paris. As the gallery puts it, "to be without an address is to be deprived of a place where one is registered, situated, recognised", while to be without a title is to slip free of any fixed category.

The show is built around two Arabic words for movement. Tarḥīl describes displacement that is imposed: expulsion and being torn from a territory. Tirḥāl describes the nomadic life, in which circulation is itself a way of being. Between these two poles, the artists trace the material, social and imaginative marks that displacement leaves behind.

Each brings a distinct language to the question. Cherkaoui, known for pushing Arabic calligraphy towards abstraction, is represented by a calligraphic composition assembled from electronic circuit boards. Nemmaoui's photograph from his series Air Twelve Land isolates a lone tree and a pick-up truck in an open desert, while Arejdal, whose own story includes a failed attempt to cross to the Canary Islands, and Fettaka, a filmmaker and collagist, extend the theme in their own materials.

For audiences across the region, where questions of borders, migration and belonging are anything but abstract, Bidoun Unwan offers a quietly pointed reading of what it means to belong somewhere, and it is well worth seeing inside the gallery's restored 1932 Art Deco building in Guéliz.